Six weeks of our practicum have passed and I hope all of our fellows are doing fine. For the past few weeks, two observations were respectively done by my supervisor and mentor. The feedbacks they gave were constructive and I discovered the weakness from my own lessons. We have to admit that many things happen in a classroom. No matter how systematically we prepare our lessons, they may not be implemented as expected. Therefore, we are always required to make wise decisions on whether all the students are actively involved in the lesson we prepared. Yet it is not easy to engage both good and weak students effectively at the same time. The suggestion my mentor gives me is getting students work in groups and assign the specific tasks to each of the group. It normally works because students can be more focused in a group rather than a whole class. In addition, visual stimuli are absolutely necessary in attracting students’ attention. Kids as well as teenagers are always interested in the colorful and intriguing things.
When I started my teaching practice at the very beginning, I often found it a headache to deal with disruptive students. And undoubtedly, there is always at least a group of talkative students in each class. However, the more I get to know them, the clearer I realize that they are excellent or even talented. And I understand when students are progressing at different pace, I have to give them work from basic to challenging so that everyone can participate in the learning process. Lastly, we have to make sure that students have gone through every important aspect as some repetition is essential to enhance their learning.
Fortunately, students are busy having their exams these weeks. I temporarily feel a sense of relief. The routine for everyday is either invigilating examinations or relieving a class. Because there is no teaching during the examination weeks, I make good use of time to learn from other teachers in the school. Through their experiences, I can tell experienced teachers should be informative and knowledgeable. And most importantly, they are encouraging, responsible and caring. So never stop learning, and never stop improving!
Best regards,
Wang Lin
"No matter how systematically we prepare our lessons, they may not be implemented as expected." I'm quite agree with you~
ReplyDeleteThe first thing I learnt from the teachers here is you need to know when to stop your students while they are talking or presenting. Most of the students here are totally no problem in speaking, once they open their mouth, if you don't stop them, they will just talk talk talk. We encourage students to speak, to share and to think. However, we must be a straight timekeeper. Unless the lesson plan cannot be achieved. So, learning how to excite them willing to talk in your class, as well as stop them properly is very important for us.
Keep fighting~ my friend
As I read your post, I can't help but feel all that you wrote is very, very true and it is happening in most of our classes as well.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, I quote you "No matter how systematically we prepare our lessons, they may not be implemented as expected" - this is brilliant, how you put it in words. Teachers are not robots, they are human that are required to make quick decisions should anything unpleasant or unplanned occur in the classroom so that the lesson will not stray too far away. Sometimes, our lesson is so well-planned but little disruptions such as lack of time may affect the effectiveness of the lesson. Planning is just to make the teacher feel more at ease but no one have ultimate control over what will happen during the planned lesson, as things sometimes just happen unexpectedly.
Also, Wang Lin, I agree with you that the talkative students who sometimes disrupt the lesson are usually the most smart and intelligent ones. They may be making noise but they know what they are talking about. We cannot and must not restrict them from speaking as they have brilliant ideas but we should however remind them to control their volume / speech.